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When I was a child,
I knew I had superpowers.
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That's right.
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I thought I was absolutely amazing
because I could understand
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and relate to the feelings
of brown people,
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like my grandfather,
a conservative Muslim guy.
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And also, I could understand
my Afghan mother, my Pakistani father,
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not so religious but
laid-back, fairly liberal.
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And of course, I could understand
and relate to the feelings of white people.
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The white Norwegians of my country.
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You know, white, brown, whatever,
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I loved them all.
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I understood them all,
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even if they didn't always
understand each other,
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they were all my people.
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My father, though,
was always really worried.
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He kept saying that
even with the best education,
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I was not going to get a fair shake.
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I would still face discrimination,
according to him.
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And that they only way
to be accepted by white people
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would be to become famous.
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Now mind you, he had this conversation
with me when I was seven-years-old.
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So while I'm seven-years-old,
he said, look,
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so its either got to be sports,
or its got to be music.
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He didn't know anything about sports --
bless him -- so it was music.
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So when I was seven-years-old,
he gathered all my toys, all my dolls,
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and he threw them all away.
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In exchange he gave me
a crappy little Casio keyboard
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and singing lessons.
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He forced me, basically, to practice
for hours and hours every single day.
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Very quickly, he also had me performing
for larger and larger audiences,
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and bizarrely, I became almost
a kind of poster child
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for Norwegian multi-culturalism.
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I felt very proud, of course.
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Because even the newspapers were starting
to write nice things about brown people,
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so I could feel that
my superpower was growing.
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So when I was 12-years-old,
walking home from school,
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I took a little detour
because I wanted to buy
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my favorite sweets called Salty Feets.
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I know they sound kind of awful,
but I absolutely love them.
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They're basically these little salty
licorice bits in the shape of feet.
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And now that I say it out loud,
I realize how terrible that sounds,
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but be that as it may,
I absolutely love them.
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So on my way into the store,
there was this grown white guy
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in the doorway blocking my way.
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So I tried to walk around him,
and as I did that, he stopped me
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and he was staring at me,
and he spit in my face,
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and he said, get out of my way
you little black bitch,
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you little Paki bitch,
go back home where you came from.
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I was absolutely horrified.
I was staring at him.
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I was too afraid to wipe
the spit off my face,
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even as it was mixing with my tears.
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I remember looking around,
hoping that any minute now,
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a grown-up is going to come
and make this guy stop.
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But instead, people kept hurrying past me
and pretended not to see me.
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I was very confused
because I was thinking,
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well, my white people, come on!
Where are they? What's going on?
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How come they're not
coming and rescuing me?
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So, needless to say,
I didn't buy the sweets.
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I just ran home as fast as I could.
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Things were still okay, though, I thought.
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As time went on, the more successful
I became, I eventually started attracting
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harassment from brown people.
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Some men in my parent's community
felt that it was unacceptable
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and dishonorable for a woman
to be involved in music
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and to be so present in the media.
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So very quickly, I was starting to become
attacked at my own concerts.
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I remember one of the concerts,
I was onstage, I lean into the audience
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and the last thing I see is
a young brown face
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and the next thing I know
some sort of chemical is thrown in my eyes
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and I remember I couldn't really see
and my eyes were watering
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but I kept singing anyway.
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I was spit in the face in the streets
of Oslo, this time by brown men.
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They even tried to
kidnap me at one point.
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The death threats were endless.
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I remember one older bearded guy
stopped me in the street one time,
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and he said, the reason
I hate you so much
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is because you make
our daughters think
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they can do whatever they want.
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A younger guy warned me
to watch my back.
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He said music is un-Islamic
and the job of whores,
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and if you keep this up,
you are going to be raped
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and your stomach will be cut out so that
another whore like you will not be born.
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Again, I was so confused.
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I couldn't understand
what was going on.
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My brown people now starting
to treat me like this -- how come?
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Instead of bridging the worlds,
the two worlds, I felt like I was
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falling between my two worlds.
I suppose for me, spit was kryptonite.
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So by the time I was 17-years-old,
the death threats were endless
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and the harassment was constant.
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It got so bad, at one point my mother
sat me down and said, look,
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we can no longer protect you,
we can no longer keep you safe,
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so you're going to have to go.
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So I bought a one-way ticket to London.
I packed my suitcase, and I left.
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My biggest heartbreak at that point
was that nobody said anything.
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I had a very public exit from Norway.
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My brown people, my white people,
nobody said anything.
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Nobody said, hold on, this is wrong.
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Support this girl, protect this girl
because she is one of us.
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Nope. Nobody said that.
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Instead, I felt like,
you know at the airport, on the baggage
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carousel you have these different
suitcases going around and around
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and there's always that one suitcase left
at the end, the one that nobody wants,
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the one that nobody comes to claim.
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I felt like that. I'd never felt so alone.
I'd never felt so lost.
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So, after coming to London,
I did eventually resume my music career.
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Different place but unfortunately
the same old story.
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I remember a message sent to me
saying that I was going to be killed
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and that rivers of blood were going
to flow and that I was going to be raped
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many times before I died.
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By this point, I have to say,
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I was actually getting used
to messages like this,
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but what became different was that
now they started threatening my family.
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So once again, I packed my suitcase,
I left music and I moved to the US.
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I'd had enough. I didn't want to have
anything to do with this anymore.
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And I was certainly not
going to be killed for something
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that wasn't even my dream --
it was my father's choice.
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So I kind of got lost.
I kind of fell apart.
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But I decided that what I wanted to do
is spend the next however many years
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of my life supporting young people
and to try to be there in some small way,
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whatever way that I could.
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I started volunteering for various
organizations that were working
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with young Muslims inside of Europe.
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And, to my surprise, what I found
was so many of these young people
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were suffering and struggling.
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They were facing so many problems
with their families and their communities
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who seemed to care more about
their honor and their reputation than the
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happiness and the lives of their own kids.
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I started feeling like maybe I wasn't
so alone, maybe I wasn't so weird.
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Maybe there are more of
my people out there.
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The thing is, what most people
don't understand is that there are so many
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of us growing up in Europe who
are not free to be ourselves.
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We're not allowed to be who we are.
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We are not free to marry or to be in
relationships with people that we choose.
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We can't even pick our own career.
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This is the norm in the
Muslim heartlands of Europe,
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even in the freest societies in the world,
we're not free.
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Our lives, our dreams, our future
does not belong to us,
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it belongs to our parents
and their community.
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I found endless stories of young people
who are lost to all of us,
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who are invisible to all of us but
who are suffering
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and they are suffering alone.
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Kids we are losing to forced marriages,
honor-based violence and abuse.
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So, eventually, I realized,
after several years of working
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with these young people that
I will not be able to keep running.
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I can't spend the rest of my life
being scared and hiding and
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that I'm actually going
to have to do something.
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And I also realized that my silence,
our silence, allows abuse
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like this to continue.
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So I decided that I wanted to put
my childhood superpower to some use
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by trying to make people on the different
sides of these issues understand
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what its like to be a young person stuck
between your family and your country.
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So I started making films
and I started telling stories.
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I also wanted people to understand
the deadly consequences of us
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not taking these problems seriously.
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So the first film I made was about Benaz.
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She was a 17-year-old
Kurdish girl in London.
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She was obedient, she did
whatever her parents wanted.
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She tried to do everything right.
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She married some guy that
her parents chose for her, even though
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he beat and raped her constantly.
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And when she tried to go
to her family for help, they said,
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well you got to go back,
and be a better wife.
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Because they didn't want
a divorced daughter on their hands
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because, of course, that would bring
dishonor on the family.
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She was beaten so badly
her ears would bleed,
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and when she finally left and she found
a young man that she chose
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and she fell in love with,
the community and the family found out
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and she disappeared.
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She was found three months later.
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She'd been stuffed into a suitcase
and buried underneath the house.
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She had been strangled,
she had been beaten to death
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by three men, three cousins
on the orders of her father and uncle.
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The added tragedy of Benaz's story
is that she had gone to the police
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in England five times,
asking for help,
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telling them that she was
going to be killed by her family.
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The police didn't believe her
so they didn't do anything.
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And the problem with this is that
not only are so many of our kids
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facing this problem within their families
and within their families' communities,
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but they're also
meeting misunderstandings
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and apathy in the countries
that they grow up in.
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When their own families betray them,
they look to the rest of us,
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and when we don't understand,
we lose them.
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So while I was making this film,
several people said to me, well Deeyah,
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you know, this is just their culture,
this is just what those people do
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to their kids and
we can't really interfere.
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I can assure you being murdered
is not my culture -- you know?
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And surely people who look like me,
young women who come
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from backgrounds like me,
should be subject to the same rights,
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the same protections as anybody else
in our country, why not?
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So, for my next film, I wanted to try
and understand why some of our
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young Muslim kids in Europe are drawn
to extremism and violence.
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But with that topic,
I also recognized that
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I was going to have to face my worst fear:
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the brown men with beards.
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The same men, or similar men, to the ones
that have hounded me for most of my life.
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Men that I've been afraid of
most of my life.
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Men that I've also deeply disliked,
for many, many years.
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So I spent the next two years
interviewing convicted terrorists,
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jihadis and former extremists.
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What I already knew,
what was very obvious already,
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was that religion, politics,
Europe's colonial baggage, also
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Western foreign policy failures
failures of recent years,
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were all a part of the picture.
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But what I was more interested
in finding out was what are the human,
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what are the personal
reasons why some of our
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young people are susceptible
to groups like this.
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And what really surprised me
was that I found wounded human beings.
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Instead of the monsters that I was
looking for, that I was hoping to find --
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quite frankly because it
would have been very satisfying --
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I found broken people.
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Just like Benaz, I found that these
young men were torn apart from trying
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to bridge the gaps between their families
and the countries that they were born in.
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And what I also learned is that
extremist groups, terrorist groups
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are taking advantage of these
feelings of our young people
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and channeling that cynically,
channeling that toward violence.
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Come to us, they say. "Reject both sides,
your family and your country
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because they reject you..
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For your family, their honor is more
important than you and for your country,
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a real Norwegian, Brit, or a French person
will always be white and never you."
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They're also promising our young people
things that they crave:
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significance, heroism,
a sense of belonging and purpose,
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a community that loves
and accepts them.
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They make the powerless feel powerful.
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The invisible and the silent
are finally seen and heard.
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This is what they're doing
for our young people.
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Why are these groups doing this
for our young people and not us?
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The thing is, I'm not trying to justify
or excuse any of the violence.
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What I am trying to say is that
we have to understand
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why some of our young people
are attracted to this.
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I would like to also show you, actually,
these are childhood photos
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of some of the guys in the film.
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What really struck me is
that so many of them
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-- I never would have thought this --
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but so many of them have
absent or abusive fathers.
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And several of these young guys ended up
finding caring and compassionate
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father figures within
these extremist groups.
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I also found men brutalized
by racist violence, but who found a way
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to stop feeling like victims
by becoming violent themselves.
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In fact, I found something,
to my horror, that I recognized.
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I found the same feelings that I felt
as a 17-year-old as I fled from Norway.
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The same confusion, the same sorrow,
the same feeling of being betrayed
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and not belonging to anyone.
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The same feeling of being lost
and torn between cultures.
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Having said that,
I did not choose destruction,
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I chose to pick up a camera
instead of a gun.
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And the reason I did that
is because of my superpower.
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I could see that understanding
is the answer, instead of violence.
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Seeing human beings with all
their virtues and all their flaws
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instead of continuing the caricatures:
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the us and them,
the villains and victims.
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I'd also finally come to terms with the fact
that my two cultures didn't have
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to be on a collision course but instead
became a space where I found my own voice.
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I stopped feeling like I had to pick
a side, but this took me many, many years.
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There are so many of our young people
today who are struggling with
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these same issues and
they're struggling with this alone.
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And this leaves them open
like wounds, and for some,
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the worldview of radical Islam becomes
the infection that festers
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in these open wounds.
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There's an African proverb that says,
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if the young are not initiated
into the village,
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they will burn it down
just to feel its warmth.
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I would like to ask Muslim
parents and Muslim communities,
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will you love and care for your children
without forcing them
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to meet your expectations?
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Can you choose them instead of your honor?
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Can you understand why they're so angry
and alienated when you put your honor
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before their happiness?
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Can you try to be a friend to your child
so that they can trust you
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and want to share with you
their experiences, rather than having
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to seek it somewhere else?
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And to our young people, tempted
by extremism, can you acknowledge that
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your rage is fueled by pain?
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Will you find the strength to resist those
cynical old men who want to use
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your blood for their own profits?
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Can you find a way to live?
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Can you see that the sweetest revenge
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is for you to live a happy,
full and free life?
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A life defined by you and nobody else.
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Why do you want to become
just another dead Muslim kid?
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And for the rest of us, when will we start
listening to our young people?
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How can we support them
in re-directing their pain
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into something more constructive?
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They think we don't like them.
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They think we don't care
what happens to them.
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They think we don't accept them.
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Can we find a way to make
them feel differently?
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What will it take for us to see them
and notice them before they become
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either the victims or
the perpetrators of violence?
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Can we make ourselves care about them
and consider them to be our own?
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And not just be outraged when the victims
of violence look like ourselves?
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Can we find a way to reject hatred
and heal the divisions between us?
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The thing is, we cannot afford to give up
on each other or on our kids,
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even if they've given up on us.
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We are all in this together.
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And in the long term, revenge and violence
will not work against extremists.
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Terrorists want us to huddle in our houses
in fear, closing our doors and our hearts.
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They want us to tear open more wounds
in our societies so that they can use them
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to spread their infection more widely.
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They want us to become like them:
intolerant, hateful and cruel.
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The day after the Paris attacks, a friend
of mine sent this photo of her daughter.
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This is a white girl and an Arab girl.
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They're best friends.
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This image is kryptonite for extremists.
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These two little girls with
their superpowers are showing
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the way forward towards a society
that we need to build together,
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a society that includes and supports,
rather than rejects our kids.
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Thank you for listening.